Thanks to Pinterest we’ve been doing a ton of art projects lately, so I wanted to share some of Andrea’s latest artwork. If you’ve never really understood what Pinterest is all about, you will after reading this. (It took me a while after signing up before I ever started using it, so I understand it doesn’t always “click” at first.) And if you need an invite to Pinterest, let me know and I’ll send you one.

Since it’s October, we’ve been doing a ton of fall and Halloween themed art. Pinterest has had so many great ideas for me to use. I actually like to pin a bunch of stuff, then let Andrea pick what she wants to do by looking at the site.

She’s been really obsessed with fall leaves, so I knew she’d like this project. She colored in the the tree trunks and grass, then cut out all the paper for the glued-on leaves while I hole punched all the “falling” leaves. She glued her leaves on with a glue stick while I filled the ziploc baggie with my hole punched leaves, and then I taped the baggie between the trees page and a sheet of blue cardstock when she was done. I think it turned out pretty well and she loves it.

This is a fall tree with leaves painted on with Q-tips (inspired by this), and a pumpkin that Andrea drew free-hand and then filled in with watercolor paint. It has a huge smiley face, because, well, everything she draws/paints has a huge smiley face on it. 🙂

We attempted to recreate this leaf craft I saw on Pinterest, using tempera paint instead of pastels. I had to help Andrea a lot, as she didn’t get the idea of starting in the center of the leaf and painting out, but she still enjoyed it, and a couple turned out okay. We need more pretty leaves in our yard to do crafts like this.

We did some Halloween crafts a few weeks ago, and Andrea loved it, so when I saw this, I thought we’d give it a try. Unfortunately, after I told Andrea about it and she was anxious to paint her feet white, I realized we had no full-size black construction paper, so we had to improvise. Fortunately, we had half-sized pieces of black construction paper, so we used those instead. Andrea wanted to use googly-eyes on her ghosts, and add a smiley face with green marker. I think they turned out great.

When I saw this Halloween spider craft on Pinterest, I wasn’t sure if Andrea would like it or not, since I thought spiders might be too scary for her, but this was one of her favorite projects yet. She made several of these spiders, and painted eyes and a big smiley face on every one of them. I kept trying to get her to paint the smiley faces right side up instead of sideways, but she wasn’t having it. 🙂

These last two Halloween pictures are just random fun things we decided to do. For the first, Andrea painted ghosts and then I gave her black construction paper to cut out shapes for the eyes and noses and she glued them on. The second was a pumpkin she drew completely on her own with markers one day. She really likes drawing suns, pumpkins, smiley faces, and other simple, but very recognizable pictures I’ve noticed.

We’ve also done a few non-fall/Halloween themed crafts too.

This was a random picture where just Andrea drew a big rectangle with crayons one day, and then asked me if she could fill it in with paint. I gave her a paper plate with small blobs of red, blue, and yellow tempera paint on it and told her she could mix the colors to make other colors. She really liked the mixing, and managed to paint a little purple, green, and orange as you can see.

The picture on the left, below, was an idea I had to help Andrea with some frustration she’s had with doing color-by-number type pages. Recently, I printed out this worksheet, where it said to color all the little a’s green and all the big A’s brown. Well, she colored only the letter, not the whole shape it was in, no matter how many times I tried to show her to color the whole thing, so couldn’t make out the “hidden” acorn shape on the page. I know she likes to fill in shapes when painting, so I thought we’d do another color-by-number type sheets with paint, and she loved it. She helped me get out the colors we needed for the worksheet, and then painted it all in. Maybe this will help next time she’s supposed to color a picture like this with crayons. We had leftover paint, so I gave her a blank piece of paper and told her to paint something. She made the picture to the right, below. She said it is a “cool map,” which isn’t surprising since she loves to draw maps for us all the time.

This is another somewhat out-of-season craft, but she loves butterflies, so we did it on a whim after I saw this similar idea. We used coffee filters and very diluted water color paints with a big brush. After they dried, I twisted the pipe cleaner around the middle and let Andrea curl the ends of the antennae. She loves these little butterflies, and was so proud that she made them herself.

Whew! This girl sure does like her crafts! We’ve been busy lately. I hope it continues. She loves making all these things almost as much as I seem to love finding the ideas on Pinterest. 😉